


Start with a Strong and Persistent Desire

by hereticalvision



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Community: hd_holidays, Darkfic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-24
Updated: 2011-02-24
Packaged: 2017-10-15 22:16:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hereticalvision/pseuds/hereticalvision
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Draco Malfoy returns to England after years abroad, a chance meeting with his old rival Harry Potter quickly leads to all-consuming sexual obsession.  But when that obsession turns destructive neither of them will survive unscathed.</p><p>Contains angry sex, wall sex, bondage, biting, mild D/s implications and includes themes of infidelity and violence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Start with a Strong and Persistent Desire

**Author's Note:**

> This is an H/D remix of the incomparable [No night is too long](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0313410/), required viewing for angst-loving slash junkies. Title from Vex Red.

I know what you seem to think, but it wasn't about revenge. Revenge for what, after all? A half-remembered childhood slight? The death of a Father killed by his own Dark Lord? No, it wasn't revenge, not at all.

I thought it was love, at first. I really did.

Where should I begin? It started from the moment I met him again, I suppose. I say "again" though we were never exactly friends. I don't think we could ever have been friends at school, not after that disastrous first meeting and the childish insults of the years that followed. I liked to think we were sparring partners but in truth we were barely acquaintances then. I didn't even blame him for my expulsion from Hogwarts. After all, it was my father who had tried to blackmail and intimidate the governors and no surprise if they chose to take their anger out on his son.

On reflection it seems revenge may have been a theme in my life after all.

The school governors had me expelled from Hogwarts after my second year, as you know. Father was absolutely livid, but Mother persuaded him that it was no bad thing to have me away from Dumbledore, who so strongly favoured Harry Potter, and Durmstrang, after all, has quite the international reputation. The curriculum there to this day includes any number of fascinating subjects Hogwarts does not see fit to teach. And despite the fact that it meant I was hundreds of miles away from home when both my parents died, I wouldn't have given up my time at Durmstrang. Dumbledore could never have broken the news so compassionately, my Slytherins would never have been enough to keep the gloating Gryffindors at bay. No – for whatever it cost me, the choice was the right one.

And so, at the age of thirteen, I began my education for the second time. I was a little wary of starting at a new school, but I had been a leader of sorts in Slytherin and had no doubt whatsoever that I would find considerable social success at Durmstrang.

Durmstrang was a smaller school than Hogwarts. There were no houses as such; instead there were five specialisations, and living arrangements were decided on that basis. Dark Arts was one possible specialisation of course, but my favourite subject in Hogwarts had been Potions and so I opted for Anticipatory Disciplines, which included Potions, Arithmancy, Divination – anything involving preparation ahead of time. There were many lessons to be learned from the principles of anticipation and others, of course, from those who studied them.

The first thing I learned was that dropping my family name in this company barely made anyone blink. In Slytherin it had been currency; here it was largely irrelevant. Everyone was pureblooded of course, but each pupil had to stand or fall on their own merits. Precedence had to be earned and for one to whom everything had come so easily, everything with one glaring exception, well, it was daunting in the extreme.

I had never seen myself as a brat before, but the older students had myriad ways in which to communicate their displeasure with a mere third year who had no control over the things that burst out of his mouth. The junior school was expected to defer to the seniors in all things and they in turn coached, taught and took care of the juniors. And disciplined them, naturally.

Perhaps you think I should be angry about this, too. Though at the time I concede I was furious and miserable, now, with the understanding that comes of maturity, I see that it was the making of me. I had the brat beaten out of me and I learned _other_ ways to obtain the things I desired.

Though it had worked for me at home and in my first years of school, in the real world being obnoxious rarely gets you what you want. That was a harsh lesson, but I had to learn it before I could understand that charm, on the other hand, is quite the effective stratagem. So is knowing when to keep one's mouth shut. I learned to control my tendency to caustic remarks, to cajole instead of demand, to flatter instead of mock. I learned, in short, how to be a much better version of my father than I might otherwise ever have become. I wish he had lived to meet the version of his son of whom he could have been proud.

I'm sorry, I see you are becoming impatient.

I wanted to return to England as soon as I took my NEWTs, but Highmistress Ninotchka begged me to stay on and assist in the teaching of Potions. With my parents dead I had no urgent rush to return to a home still torn by war and so I remained for three further years, teaching and enjoying the comfortable lifestyle to which I was so accustomed. I could tell you such stories from those days! But we're here to talk about Potter, of course. Suffice it to say that when the time eventually came to leave I was reluctant in some ways but I had never been able to forget that I had not even visited my parents' graves. I had wanted to return home for their funerals, back in my sixth year, but Ninotchka had been adamant that none of her charges leave the school unprotected and while I had railed against her and wept for my strong father and elegant mother, I received their last letter from the family solicitor a day later and wept again to read my mother's entreaties to stay out of the war, to survive. There was no hope, she said, unless I survived. And so when I was certain it was safe, I left largely to repair the damage that had been done to the family in the names of both my parents.

As I had inherited the Malfoy estate after my father's death and had most _definitely_ been out of the country during the conflict, the war reparations did not bankrupt me. I did much better on that score than any number of my acquaintance. That said, finding employment proved difficult. The Malfoy fortune was largely intact, but in political circles the Malfoy name was mud. That would have bothered me had I not been so thoroughly enjoying my reintroduction to British pureblood society.

Do not make the mistake of believing that the purebloods no longer hold sway. After the war the last remaining families simply closed ranks, determined to bide their time. I might have quickly become a hugely influential figure in those circles, but I was twenty-one and I had other priorities. I was delighted to see Pansy again, happily married but pleased to point out other prospects. She and Blaise made quite the game of setting me challenges and delighting in my ability to follow through.

The coy act works equally well on men and women, you see, and equally well for seduction as for persuasion. I began rebuilding our Ministry ties but my main preoccupation became seducing a string of delectable pureblood beauties. It was frankly obscene how many were prepared to welcome me home from exile with open legs. From June, when I returned, right through until the virtual orgy that is Samhain I drank the finest elf-made wines, I dined on partially transfigured oyster-scallops, and I licked the cunt of every wife and daughter of every dignitary in the Ministry.

And while it was fun at first, a kind of delicious revenge on the people who had left my parents to die, after less than five months of this stellar treatment I became unspeakably bored. Even Pansy and Blaise couldn't think of new things to amuse me. I still attended the balls and soirees, I still indulged in a good hard fuck, but the thrill was gone.

No one resisted me, you see. I honestly think no one even tried. They saw the face and heard the manner I affected and they wanted to own me. No, not even that – they wanted to own the image I projected.

But Harry was different.

I saw him again for the first time in the lift at the Ministry of Magic. I don't remember what day it was, only that it was freezing cold and people were complaining about it to one another in that good-natured manner we affect when we have nothing else to say. I don't even remember why I was at the Ministry in the first place. Probably visiting the Minister of Magic to offer another donation to another worthy cause. I charmed the visitor badge to my lapel – we are _wizards_ after all and why the Ministry would have me stick a pin through Chinese silk robes is beyond me – and entered the lift, heading for the Minister's offices.

There were two people already in the lift: a middle-aged woman in the robes of the Wizengamot and a man. I didn't really look at first, still fussing with my visitor's badge, but when my head came up the man was looking over his shoulder at me and I recognised him.

Harry Potter. The world knows who he is, what he looks like and what he has done. But the world does not know what it feels like to stand near him. Raw power seemed to spark from every pore. He looked at me with an expression somewhere between contempt and fascination and then he turned away, dismissing me as beneath notice without further ado.

It was barely a moment, but what a moment. The expression in his eyes was absolutely arresting, his dismissal infuriating. His hair, always a disaster in school, was still a mess but he had evidently been sweating and the dampness had stuck it down over his forehead, hiding the scar. The smell of that sweat was intoxicating. He was wearing Auror's robes; he'd probably been out on a case, chasing down a criminal. I imagined Harry Potter coming to arrest me and shocked myself with an explicit fantasy about being wrestled to the ground and held there by Potter's weight grinding down on my body. It shocked and confused me in a way nothing had done for years. I actually blushed in my confusion and looked away, and when I looked up again the lift had stopped at his floor and he was gone.

I see you wondering about the confusion. You are quite right to surmise that it was not because Potter was male. I had always been open-minded in that area. I promised Viktor Krum my virginity if his team won the Quidditch World Cup back when I was in fourth year. They didn't, of course, and Viktor came back to me crushed, begging for another chance to prove himself. And I liked him, of course, though he wasn't really my type, so I sucked his cock as a consolation prize. He stroked my hair all the way through it, and then afterwards he said he knew he'd be Durmstrang's Triwizard champion and when he won the cup he'd come back and fuck me senseless. But, of course, he never did come back.

In any case, it wasn't Harry's gender that caused such a reaction. It wasn't even the violent turn the fantasy had taken – after all, a barely restrained penchant for violence seeped out of Potter and I was certain I could not have been the only one who noticed. It was that I had never liked him, never thought about him, and now suddenly with that one glare I knew that I had to have him. That night, wanking to thoughts of Auror Potter forcing me to submit to him as I tried to resist arrest made me come harder even than the threesome with the delightful Greengrass sisters had three nights before.

I went to his office the very next day. I had tried to invent a pretext but when I arrived I simply asked if Auror Potter had a moment. He did not. I fucked the secretary that evening after taking her for dinner and the day after, lo and behold, there I was in Potter's office.

When I walked in his eyebrows shot up immediately. His eyes lazily trailed my body with a mixture of curiosity and disbelief, then he sat back in his desk chair and met my gaze.

"Interesting," was the first thing he said to me.

I allowed my mouth to curl up, aiming for a smile rather than a smirk. "Yes, I suppose I am."

He wasn't so easily swayed. "I meant the fact that I specifically told Sarah not to let you in, and yet here you are."

"Turns out there was a slot available," I said, smirking to myself.

Potter put down the quill he had been writing with and stood all at once, prowling predator-like out from behind his desk then leaning back against it. He folded his arms over his chest and even through his Auror robes, the way his muscles bunched was delicious.

"Well, Malfoy," he said, and the sound of my name made me jolt. "What can I do for you?"

It was in his eyes, you see. Nothing he said communicated anything but the way he looked at me – he _knew_ why I was there and it amused the hell out of him. I'd spent most of our barely-remembered school days smirking at him, but now he was smirking at me.

"I want to contribute," I said breathlessly, sitting down. I desperately wished for my father's affectation of carrying a cane then – it would have given my hands something to do. This was ridiculous. I had seduced dozens of people of both sexes by being suave and smooth and guarded but the way Potter was looking at me then, it was all I could do not to fall to my knees right there and reach for his cock. He knew the seductive behaviour was nothing but a front in the way only someone who had known me then could have.

"Contribute?" Potter said.

"I want to make a donation," I clarified, trying to make my tone a little more normal. "To the post-war recruitment efforts."

A shutter slammed closed in Potter's expression. "Ah. Amazing how many people who didn't fight and wouldn't help now want to give us money."

"What?" I was losing him. In my urgency I stood, looked straight into his face. "No, I can help you. I know people, I have connections and I…"

"And you don't like getting your hands dirty, isn't that it, Malfoy?" Potter's lip curled. The contempt was searing but it wasn't the bliss-inducing contempt of the lift. No, this was quite the opposite – this was Potter shutting down and turning away from me.

"I want to help," I said softly, and I reached out on pure impulse and touched his face.

I thought at that he might jump back startled or, at the most, meet my gaze but instead he pushed himself off the desk and squared up to me, intimidating despite being no taller than I am. His gaze flickered from my eyes to my mouth and his lip curled a little more. And then he moved towards me but not into the kiss I had been expecting. Instead his cheek grazed mine on the way past. I thought then that he would whisper something in my ear – something derogatory no doubt. Something about filthy Death Eaters perhaps or some further comment about my failure to participate in the war – believe me, that was something my father had had a lot to say about as well. But instead he breathed me in, filling his lungs with the scent of my neck and hair. And Merlin, I shuddered. I could feel the heat coming off his body and I wanted to touch him even more now than before. I started to raise my hands, but he was already pulling away. He still hadn't touched me – but as I gave up hope I felt his tongue flick casually across the underside of my ear lobe, wet and shockingly intimate. At that my control broke and I reached for him, curling my fingers through the back of his hair and pulling him towards me.

But he resisted, disengaging my hand and stepping away to open the door. It was all so smooth, so smooth and dispassionate I could have punched him.

Then he said, "Good day, Malfoy. Good to see you again." The bastard was laughing at me.

Feeling like nothing so much as that eleven- and twelve-year-old who'd never been refused anything in his life until this stupid boy refused his friendship, I swept out of the room, humiliated and furious and shatteringly aroused.

It was not quite what I'd had in mind, to say the least.

I spent the next few days absolutely livid. Potter had always been able to get one over on me no matter what I had done, and it seemed that hadn't changed at all despite the eight years since we had seen each other. I'd done so much and learned so much and five minutes in Potter's presence and I was a child again.

Which is probably why I reacted the way I did when he showed up at the Manor. It was Christmas Eve, no less. One of the house-elves came, quaking, to tell me that there was an Auror at the door who'd refused to give his name. I wasn't afraid exactly, but I was aware that my life could still be made difficult. So when I saw Potter I was a little relieved, a little glad, but mostly I was just angered.

"Oh, wonderful, Potter," I spat. "What the hell do you want now? Come to wind me up and leave me hanging again? Well you can forget it – I've got better things to do than feed your superiority complex so why don't you run along. I sincerely hope one of the peacocks attacks you on your way out of the grounds." With that I turned to go back into the house.

" _There's_ the Malfoy I remember!" said Potter, and I was in the middle of turning back towards him to really let him have it when he spun me round, faster than I had intended to move, and then with no preamble at all stuck his hand down the front of my trousers.

I don't know what sound I made but as his fist closed around my rapidly hardening dick he said in a heavy voice, "Make that noise again."

I must have, because he growled his approval and quickened his strokes. I leaned forward so that I could place my forehead on his shoulder, trying to keep myself upright as my knees wanted to go from under me. He hadn't so much as licked his hand and the friction hurt and I cursed at him. He laughed and tightened his hold; I brought my hand up and dug my nails into the back of his neck as I hissed with the sensation of it all.

He had been right. I wanted to submit to him, but the way I had been doing it, offering myself with doe eyes, it was a lie. It was a submission that meant nothing and he'd known it. He'd made me match him anger for anger and now I wanted to fight with him. I wanted him to _make_ me give in. I wanted him to force every response from my body, turn me inside out and imprint himself on me.

I had bottomed before but in some sense I had always been the one doing the fucking. I wanted Harry Potter to fuck me hard and mean it.

I licked the spot behind his ear just then, dragged my tongue over the curved metal of his glasses, shoved my cheek into the cold lenses and wondered why I had never gone for men with glasses before. I bit his ear and his neck too sloppily to have been sexy, using my hands now to try to shove him away, to regain some control. He wouldn't let me, not at all. He slapped my hand away when I tried to unbutton his shirt, he pinned the other behind my back when I went for his cock and I squirmed frantically away from him.

"Damn you Potter," I groaned, biting at his lips, his jaw, anywhere I could reach. "I will _not_ come in my pants before I even see your cock."

"Won't you?" he said, deadly serious, and I snarled in frustration. I had to change what was happening, I had to, so with the small bit of leverage I could manage with the arm I'd snaked around his neck, I brought my legs up around him. I didn't quite manage to get them around his waist but from the way Potter snarled I knew at least I'd managed to surprise him. His hand slithered out of my underwear, the other releasing the hand of mine he'd held behind my back and then he slammed me against the marble wall right there in the foyer of my ancestral home, slammed me against the wall and rutted against me, his hard cock delicious against mine even through our clothes.

I never thought to wonder if the house-elves were watching, to imagine how my parents would have reacted to my fucking Potter, to consider how far the cries he was tearing from my throat might carry. I didn't have the presence of mind to do anything except hold on to Potter's shoulders and lock my knees around his hips as he shoved against me again and again, heat and pressure building until I tensed with the sensation of it and cried out as I came. Potter gave a gasp of triumph and ground himself against me again. I didn't kiss him, I still hadn't kissed him, but I stuck out my tongue and he licked it with his eyes on mine before he closed them, groaning. I watched his face, the play of determination and ferocity until the tendons in his neck went taut and he finally came in a rush of wet heat.

When Potter opened his eyes I was smiling at him. He didn't smile back. "Told you you'd come before you saw my cock."

"Mm," I said, smirking. "But at least I got to feel it."

"I suppose you did at that," he said, pulling away to walk past me into the hall proper. It was only then that I noticed the front door was still open. Good thing there were no neighbours for miles.

Potter waved his wand, absently cleaning himself up, and I panicked for a moment wondering if whatever this was had already ended – but then I reminded myself he had walked _into_ the house and if that had been all he would already have left. I closed the door behind him, performing my own cleaning charm, and then politely asked if I could take his coat.

He tilted his head to one side and said, "You?"

"By 'I', I of course meant a house-elf," I acknowledged.

He gave a huff of laughter at that. And then his eyes turned predatory again, and despite the extremely satisfying orgasm of barely a minute ago, my cock jerked.

"I'm going to fuck you now," he said. "And by 'you' I mean 'your arse'." Some people would have sounded playful, some people would have sounded silly, some people would have sounded like they were trying too hard, but Potter made it an absolutely factual statement of what was going to happen and the intensity of his voice made me quiver.

I swallowed hard. Potter watched the movement of my throat and gave a mirthless grin that I can compare only to the expression on the lion's face before it kills the gazelle. He took a step towards me and my pulse increased. "Is there somewhere comfortable nearby?" he said, before dropping his voice lower and asking in a voice full of menace, "or will it be the staircase?"

I swallowed again, imagining my knees and elbows on marble steps with Potter fucking me into the stone. Potter brought every molecule in my body to singing, longing life with virtually no effort at all. I shuddered.

"My room," I said and set off up the stairs and along the hall, Potter right behind me. With every step he teased me, light caresses on my arse leading to a hand between my legs as we climbed the stairs. He cooed noises of mock-concern when he distracted me enough that I had to stop for a moment to regain my balance and it was all I could do not to fall to my knees right there. Down the hall we went, his fingers driving me mad until eventually we found my room and I turned and slammed my mouth against his.

The kiss was, if anything, more explosive even than the rutting that had come before. I had initiated it, yes, but I didn't stay in control for long. And Potter's tight control from moments before was also obliterated with that kiss, as his tongue slipped into my mouth hot and demanding, his fingers pulling at my hair. All I could do was hold on to his head as his tongue stabbed itself into my mouth, hard and insistent as his cock against my lower body. All I could do was kiss him back and realise I'd never get off the rollercoaster until he wanted to let me.

A Muggle metaphor, I do apologise. What I meant was that in the foyer Potter had been completely in control of both me and himself. Now I had pushed him out of control and I was caught in a storm as he tore off my clothes and shoved me onto the bed by my throat. He straddled me, pinning my arms above my head and kissing me again, his tongue filling my whole mouth until I couldn't even whimper, could barely gasp for breath.

He spelled away his clothes as he flipped me over and pressed his naked body against mine, the weight of his naked cock fitting perfectly into the curve of my arse. He hadn't prepared me at all, but when he hissed a charm filling me with lubricant it didn't matter – I was squirming against the bedcover and utterly desperate. He could have shoved anything he wanted up there and I would have loved it and begged him for more.

"Potter," I whined, so needy. "Potter."

His fingers twisted in my hair then, snapping my upper body back against him, twisting my head slightly to the side. "Say 'Harry'," came his reply, his voice cold, his hand jerking my head as though he were intent on shaking me. "Say it."

" _Harry,_ " I whimpered, helpless against the harsh command in his voice. He rewarded me by biting at the side of my mouth before releasing my hair. I whimpered again as he pulled me up onto my knees, aligning our bodies just so.

"I'm going to fuck you now," he said as he had before, but this time the words were breathed hard and heavy into my ear, his body pressed along the length of mine. And then he slid inside me and oh, it was perfect. Brutal and perfect as he thrust mercilessly into me, his fingers digging into my hips leaving bruises everywhere he touched me, his teeth carving crescent shapes into my shoulders and neck as his voice snarled and grunted right into my ear. Merlin, I writhed and begged, so alive with the sheer joy of all that terrible strength and fury focused on me. At times I thought he might tear my whole body apart, and I wanted it, I wanted him to.

I think at first he almost wanted to scare me but I never said no, I never said stop. I said _yes_ and _more_ and _harder_ and _please_ and _please_ and _PLEASE_. He made me sob with desire before he finally let me come, and when he came himself it was with a shout of triumph and a thrust so hard my eyes rolled up in my head. It was the fuck of a lifetime.

After, he collapsed on top of me. The weight of him on my back, pressing me down – if my body hadn't been numb with satiation I think that alone might have roused me. But as it was, I just lay there, exhausted, until eventually I found the strength to twist round and lap at the sweat pooling at the base of his throat, my muscles still shaking.

"Merry Christmas," he said, a little humour showing in his eyes for the first time, and I smiled.

I'd been right from the very beginning; I'd somehow known all along that Harry would be different. He didn't waste time with the niceties. He hadn't waited for me to come to him, and he certainly hadn't come to me bearing Christmas presents or nice words. He stripped me down to my naked howling core, ripped a need in me that only he could fill, clawing into my soul and reducing my will to nothing. I'd never felt anything like it before. Of course I thought it was love.

And it just seemed to get more intense, too. We fucked our way into the New Year and he made me scream, but he wouldn't go to the party Theo had spent so much time putting together. He never acknowledged me publicly and that pissed me off but when I pushed it his eyes would get this haunted look and he'd just throw me down and fuck me harder. He'd show up at the Manor twice a week like clockwork and fuck me anywhere the mood took him – the staircase fantasy was played out as was every other fantasy I'd ever had about my home. My father's desk, the garden by the ornamental pond.

But my bed was the centre of it all. I was thrown down on it on my back, on my face, on my side. I was pulled into a sitting position so that Harry could fuck my mouth and I gagged and choked and urged him on. I was spread eagled with school ties to the four posters. Those same bedposts were elaborately carved with a cross-hatch pattern etched into them and several hard lumps sticking out; Harry tied my wrists together in front of it then fucked me from behind so that on his every stroke my body was dragged along the sharp corners of the carvings from my pelvis to my collarbone. That memory makes me hot even now.

Harry never took me out to dinner. He'd go out on cases without a word, disappear for days at a time and then show up and pound my arse until my teeth rattled.

At first I thought I'd never get enough of him. I never knew what was going on with him or when I'd see him again. It was so fucking sexy. He was constantly pouring all his frustration and fury into me, and I could take it all. I was a vessel for him to rid himself of all the emotions buried in his cracked and broken parts, and I delighted in driving him to ride me harder, give me more.

Months it went on like that until one night after a particularly rough and satisfying shag, he started to make his usual move to leave. He did that all the time too – finish, then after a few minutes to catch his breath he'd pull on his robes and go, out on a case, back to the office, whatever. He'd only stayed the night through a handful of times and on this night I was determined he was staying. As he tried to separate our bodies I shifted until my weight was more fully on him and I glared.

"Why can't we ever go somewhere else?" I asked him. "Why am I your dirty little secret?"

Harry looked at me. "You need to ask?"

That stung. "My father? You're the last person I'd expect to judge by my family." I pulled away from him then, but he caught my wrist.

"That's not what I meant," he said softly.

"It's fine," I snapped. "Go run off with your friends, Weasel and the..."

"If you call her a Mudblood," Harry said in his most vicious tone, "I will tie you up and whip you until you cannot walk."

That threat stopped me dead. Harry had never harmed me, really, the bites and bruises notwithstanding, but I believed in that moment that he would do it. He grabbed my face in both hands and looked into my eyes, his gaze flickering from one to the other until he was evidently satisfied by what he saw and then he said, something wild and barely leashed in his tone, "How could you not know? Everyone knows."

And I'm honestly not sure how it had escaped me, to be honest. I would have thought Pansy would have told me during one of her post-return lectures, though I'd mostly tuned them out. Durmstrang was its own little world, doubly so after Karkaroff disappeared, and I was so self-involved that I'd never taken it in. But the upshot was this: there was nobody else in Harry's life.

Weasley and Granger had stayed his best friends right the way through school. Harry had had to help Dumbledore with the horcruxes, and after Dumbledore took him to retrieve one, Harry had watched as the potion he'd had to feed his headmaster slowly and agonisingly poisoned him. He couldn't bear the guilt and left right away, Weasley and Granger in tow. They had found the first horcrux quite easily, but the stress had worn on Weasley and in a fit of temper he stormed off leaving Harry and Granger behind.

"I never thought he would leave us," Potter said, lying on his back now and staring with unseeing eyes up at the ceiling. "But the horcrux was playing with our minds and he..." Harry shrugged bitterly.

And then Granger died. My dear old Aunt Bellatrix killed her when they were caught breaking into the Black vault at Gringott's. Harry's voice was utterly devoid of emotion, but I felt it.

"I was alone then," he went on. "I was alone until the Battle of Hogwarts. Ron had done so much – he tried to make up for it, found one of the horcruxes himself, but when he heard Hermione was dead," at this Potter had forced himself to shrug, "he killed himself."

I didn't know what to say. I could have said I was sorry, but it wasn't as though I'd ever liked either of them. Instead I placed my hand on his chest. The simple touch seemed to wake him, as though he had been dreaming, and he rolled himself on top of me, pinning me beneath his weight. Neither of us was hard, it wasn't like that. Something far worse was coming, I could feel it.

"Ginny didn't want me after that," Potter said in a rush, the words so painful he could barely force them out. "Thinks that Ron might have been right, that I might have wanted Hermione – that was part of why he left but it wasn't true. And she hated me because I couldn't stop him. I couldn't stop Hermione from dying, I couldn't stop Ron from leaving or from killing himself, I couldn't stop Ginny from starting to hate me," he was crying by then, lying on top of me and crying, Merlin it was awful, "and the Weasleys wouldn't talk to me anymore and they were all I'd ever had." Harry shuddered, the terrible weight of all of that suddenly removed from him. He shifted to rest his head on my chest and I reached out to stroke his hair, despite the fact that I was wishing myself a million miles away from this gushingly revolting display.

"But now there's you," he said. "And I don't know how to do this. I'm so afraid I'll do something wrong that I've been throwing everything I can think of at you but you're still here. You're still here," he said, hugging me tighter as I lay there, mute and still. "You're still here and I love you."

I wish he hadn't said it. It changed everything.

 

~o0o~

 

I think the reason I had always been fascinated by Potter was because none of the things I knew myself to be impressed him. He wasn't impressed by charm or money or class. Even my looks were not what had attracted him: he wanted to fuck the brat out of me – and I, who knew that all those other attributes were only veneer, was happy to have him do so.

But after he said he loved me…

The story about his friends, so hard for him to tell, made me look at him again. Before, I had seen someone to be admired for keeping his emotions locked down, as Father had always taught me was so very important. Now what I saw was someone a hair's breadth from breaking down completely if he allowed any of what he was feeling to show. The rigid control was not admirable – it was a self-defence technique in the process of wearing itself out.

I started to feel detached. Harry had developed a new way of touching me and it wasn't one I enjoyed. Instead of the brutal strength of our previous fucking, suddenly he was trying to be tender, gentle. It wasn't what I wanted at all. But now when I tried to pull at his flesh, urge him on, he resisted. He was always trying to slow down, show the softer side. Sometimes I felt like screaming, _This is not what I wanted from you!_

Two nights a week of the filthiest sex I'd ever known had become four nights a week of a constant urge to be somewhere else. None of this was right, none of this was what I had hoped it would be. I could feel myself recoiling – but I still had hope that if I could just find the right words, the right actions, then maybe it would go back to being the way it had been before. Hot, perverse, delicious.

"I'll miss you tonight," Harry said, kissing my shoulder as I tied my cravat in front of the mirror.

"It's one night," I reminded him with a raised eyebrow.

"You can't cancel?" he asked, reaching out to stroke my hair in that hesitant way he had when he was trying to be tender.

"I can't," I said. I needed to be away from him. I had told him not to bother dropping by that night but he had anyway, trying to change my mind. I sighed and said, "You never take me anywhere and I'm tired of staying in."

Harry looked away. "I just don't want anyone to get wind of this. There are still a lot of people who'd like to hurt me, you know. Some of the Death Eaters who escaped, some of their relatives…"

"Harry," I sighed again, and this time it was not a pose but genuine irritation. "I am not in any danger. I'll see you tomorrow." A perfunctory kiss and off I went, dressed in my finest grey silk robes.

"Darling!" said Pansy as I arrived, her manner and clothing all elegant brightness as ever. Blaise inclined his glass and allowed his eyebrow to lift slightly.

"Where on earth have you been, Malfoy?" he asked. "We were worried."

The idea that Blaise Zabini would ever worry about anyone except Pansy, and then only if she was trying to get pregnant or start an affair, made me laugh dryly. "Blaise, you are not my keeper, nor even my abominably clingy lover," I said dismissively.

"On that topic," Pansy said, inclining her head into the Parkinson Park ballroom. It had been decorated with purpose-grown greenery and fine flowers, and the room was charmed to be perfectly half-daylight brightness and half- darkness in celebration of the vernal equinox. "See anyone you like?"

I allowed my lip to curl. "Should have made the night side darker, Pansy. Ever been inside a darkroom?"

Pansy raised an eyebrow. "It really doesn't hold much appeal to me, Draco, to have total strangers grope me. They might be ugly, after all. Or low-born."

Sometimes I found Pansy's snobbery charming, but more often it simply irritated me. It had always appealed to Blaise though, and he slipped an arm around her now. I rolled my eyes and turned away – and found myself facing Astoria Greengrass.

"Draco," she said, sliding her upper lip over her teeth deliberately as she smiled. I hadn't seen her for quite a while but flashes of her body beneath mine as her sister rimmed me filled my mind. I smiled back, every bit as predatory as she.

"Darling Astoria," I purred, and lowered my mouth to kiss her hand. She tossed her black hair and smiled again. Spring wine appeared from nowhere and for one night I allowed myself to relax, relieved, into those things I had found so shallow only months before. Astoria by herself proved just as satisfying as she had with her sister, stroking my thighs and balls with that long, long hair, and gazing up at me with startling blue eyes as she swallowed my cock.

It was the first time I had been with someone else since this… whatever it was with Harry had begun. I didn't feel guilty though. I felt relieved. I knew that this would be how things came to a head.

When I went home the next morning, sure enough Harry was there waiting. I smiled at him rakishly and invited him in.

He eyed me warily. "I didn't know the party was going to last all night."

I smiled at him. "These things sometimes do. Bumped into a lot of old friends, you know how it is."

"Er, not really," he said, uncomfortable. I smirked, suddenly realising that I truly had the upper hand here. Somewhere he had lost it and I had found it – and now, if he wanted it back, this was his chance.

I shrugged with affected carelessness. "One gets to talking after all. I bumped into a lovely girl – do you remember Astoria Greengrass?"

Harry tensed. "I don't think so."

"You must. Her sister was in our class and she was always very pretty." We'd walked through the hall by now and into the breakfast parlour. "Tea, Potsy," I said absently to the ever-present house-elf, and picked up the newspaper that lay on the table.

Harry sat down, a sour look on his face. "I don't know her."

"Too bad," I said, sitting down myself and opening the paper. Potsy had poured the tea and handed it to me now. I stirred in the sugar and rested the spoon on the saucer, lifting the tea to my mouth while studying the picture on page six of the _Prophet_ , which showed over and over again on a loop Astoria's rapt expression as I slowly slid my tongue into her mouth. The flowers behind us gave the tableau a certain _je ne sais quoi_ … oh, don't look at me like that. The picture was as damning as could be, to be honest – borderline pornographic as I watched myself slide my tongue between her lips over and over, long and visibly wet. And Astoria – I've always loved how responsive she is, you know. In that photograph she shivers as though about to come apart completely, and sort of folds herself into my body, visibly dying to get closer.

Harry took one look at it and his eyes snapped up to mine. "You fucked her?" he said, his tone suggesting that the wild, raw thing I'd seen in him was about come loose.

I sipped my tea. "You don't mind, do you? It's just, well, the opportunity presented itself."

The cup was still resting on my bottom lip when Harry punched me in the face. The force of it knocked the cup out of my grasp, sending it flying, even as my head snapped back. Harry had barely moved, but there was broken crockery on the floor and blood pouring out of my lip.

There was that split second pause that happens when you feel so shocked that there's no room to react.

And then, without thought, came instinct; with a cry of rage I launched myself at Harry, knocking over the table and his chair on my way to struggle with him. Our wands were utterly forgotten in the urge to hurt one another and _feel_ it all happening in the most physical manner possible. I had tackled Harry to the ground, but it didn't take long for him to turn to the tables, flipping us over so that he was on top of me. His weight pinned me down and I longed for that flash of furious excitement I had always used to feel, but it wasn't there. Instead I just felt angry at his possessiveness, his irrational need to cling on to me. I just felt rage.

Harry's anger slumped almost as soon as it had risen. Lying on top of me, he shoved my face to the side and breathed hard into my neck before rolling off me on to the floor. Potsy, the little twerp, was dancing about and moaning about the breakages, but Harry and I just lay there for a moment, both trying to catch our breath.

From nowhere, suddenly I was even angrier and I pulled Harry back on top of me. "Don't you _dare_ ," I snarled at him. "Don't you dare back down now." I tried to grind up against him, but he pinned me down, disgust writ large on his features.

"Is this what you want?" he demanded as his hand found its way down my body, his face looming over mine. "You want me to fuck you like this?"

"Yes!" I insisted, knowing that he wanted to draw away. "Yes!"

"Fuck," he said, and I could feel him getting hard even though I knew he hadn't wanted to. He hadn't wanted to like seeing me bloody in front of him. This wasn't the image of love he'd had in mind and I knew that, knew it and wanted to disabuse him of all those notions. But the sex was still not quite right – furious, yes, hard, yes, but still not that thrill of joy that had been there before the idiot had dragged feelings into everything. I came, then he came, then we lay there for a moment in torn, sticky clothes, before Harry rolled off me and performed a couple of cleaning charms. He sat there for a moment with his knees propping up his elbows. I didn't look at him, and he didn't look at me.

Eventually, in a tone full of self-loathing, he gasped out, "I never should have told you how I felt. I should have kept my mouth shut. I should have known you'd react like this. I should have known."

I closed my eyes tight against the strange sense of loss, and I wished again that he had never said any of it.

He got up then, and left the room.

Things got worse after that. Harry veered wildly from being furious with me and being the gentle, concerned lover. But we both knew that his control over this thing between us had shattered. He had turned himself over to me completely, and I had not the slightest desire to accept such an arduous responsibility.

I hadn't gone into it wanting to hurt him but now there didn't seem to be any graceful way out. It was part of my speciality that my former lovers were always let down gently, always reassured that it was nothing personal and always, always retained as future potential fuck buddies, even if the sex had been sub-par. It did not do to break the hearts of Daddy's darlings, after all.

But this… How on earth was I supposed to get myself out of it? Harry's desperate hands on me made me feel increasingly trapped and shaky. I pulled away further, he tried to bring me back in close – it was awful.

When he suggested a weekend away in the Highlands, I really didn't want to go. I had felt myself becoming more and more withdrawn and snappish. I was tempted to fuck around a bit more so that he'd break up with me himself, but I was starting to realise that he wouldn't let go, ever, no matter how badly I hurt him. The other hurts in him went too deep. Somehow without any emotional encouragement from me, he had rendered me essential to his emotional well-being. I knew instinctively that however nicely I tried to pull away, whatever I said to end it, it might well be the death of him. How ironical that sounds in retrospect.

In any case, Harry asked me to go away with him for the weekend and I said yes, even though it was the last thing, the very last thing I wanted to do.

We took a Portkey to a place called, of all things, _Laide_ , out on the west coast of the Highlands. It being June already the climate was at least temperate, but the moment we got to our charming converted croft house I wondered how it was that I had managed not to leave him during these long three months, and how I was going to stand the days of having no other company but his.

Harry smiled at me, tentative but relaxed as he unpacked his few things while I tried to stave off the boredom by transfiguring a chair into various shapes. He came up to brush his mouth along by my cheek. We hadn't had sex in a fortnight, due to a request for a cooling-off period which Harry had objected to, but to which he had acquiesced when I mentioned an incident that had happened only a week before.

The Weasley girl, whom I had not seen since her possession by Voldemort resulted in my expulsion, cornered me in Diagon Alley. She simply reached out and took my arm – but I was so used to my female acquaintance slipping their hands under the crook of my elbow that I didn't realise it wasn't one of them until the hooded head turned and I was staring into narrowed hazel eyes. She might have been pretty if naked hatred hadn't been blazing from her face.

"Miss Weasley," I said, coming to a halt. "What an unexpected…"

Her wand-tip was shoved into my side before I could so much as finish greeting her. "Is he seriously fucking you, Malfoy?" she said.

If this had happened back when Harry had been rogering me senseless, I would have found it amusing in the extreme. But given the circumstances I merely felt my face shut down.

"I do not know to whom you are referring," I sneered, and moved to walk away.

The wand-tip jabbed a little more firmly. "Malfoy, I –"

"We are in the middle of Diagon Alley, Miss Weasley. Do you really mean to attack me?" That genuinely did amuse me. A Slytherin would have planned an attack like this, worked out how to frame their target for starting it, prove that they had initiated any fight. But I was too tired for Wealsey to goad me and in typical Gryffindor fashion she appeared to have no other plan. I just looked at her until, with a growl of frustration, she turned away.

I hadn't mentioned any of this to Harry, suspecting that it would merely make him even more unreasonably possessive. If I thought that had been bad before the Astoria incident, well, it was even worse now. The last thing I needed was for him to think I really was in some kind of danger.

So when he demanded to know why I hadn't told him and I demanded to know how he'd known… Can you imagine how invasive it feels to know that the person you are sleeping with is having the Aurors follow you?

After a screaming fight, I had told him that we needed to cool off for a while. But then he begged me to go away with him. And I mean, he _begged_. I remembered the bratty child I had been and cursed myself for ever wanting Harry Potter at my mercy.

The brush of Harry's mouth now reminded me of just how vulnerable he was to me. I had barely touched him in a fortnight and he was becoming desperate. I had known but somehow failed to realise that he would of course expect our intimacy – ha! – to resume on this break. But when he lowered his hands to my shoulders I simply lurched to my feet and announced my intention of taking a walk.

Laide was lovely. There was a beach which at high tide was merely a few feet of pebbles but was at low tide miles of sand that any tropical island would envy. Scotland has beautiful beaches. It's a pity it's always cold.

Harry tried furiously to turn the day romantic – the walk on the beach was a good start. I dragged him to the nearby hills ostensibly to enjoy the view, but primarily to tire him out. But Harry's frustration was growing. The third time he not-so-subtly suggested that we return to the croft, I agreed only to take a bath as soon as we arrived. The door rattled as Harry tried to undo the locking charm and I wondered just how much of me he was prepared to smother to keep me with him.

I emerged from the bathroom fully dressed in fresh clothes, absolutely unwilling to parade in front of Harry in only a towel or robe, but it didn't seem to make a difference. One look and his eyes darkened.

"Harry, I'm tired," I said, out of excuses and out of hope.

"This won't take long," he said, pushing me face first onto the bed.

"Harry," I protested, trying to push myself up, push him off me. But he was relentless, and before I knew it he'd pulled aside my clothes and thrust into me, desperate and dry with no preparation at all. "Harry, please," I gasped, the pain tearing through me, but he just kept going until he came and collapsed onto my back.

When he rolled off me I pulled my clothes back up and curled in on myself, facing away from him. We lay there for a long time. I remember that I brought my trembling fingers to my forehead and tried not show weakness by doing something terribly dramatic like burying my face in my hands or sobbing. I remember that I knew I could never submit to him again. The urge was gone. The thought now brought no desire. In its place was absolute revulsion.

After a moment he rolled towards me, sliding an arm around my waist. I could hardly bear to have him touch me.

"I was thinking," he said softly. "We could stay here a little longer."

The thought made my skin crawl. "You have to get back to work," I reminded him.

I felt Harry shrug. "Kingsley said it should be fine. Said I deserved a week off anyway."

"You've already arranged it?" I couldn't believe it – I didn't want to believe it.

"I want to spend more time with you," he said.

No. No, absolutely not. I couldn't do that.

"I want to leave you," I whispered.

Harry's hand, stroking me, stilled. "What?"

"I want to leave you," I repeated, not looking at him.

Harry moved and I sat up, wrapping my arms around my knees. He was kneeling on the bed, looking at me as though he'd never seen me before. "You can't mean that," he said, shaking his head slowly as though if he denied it I would take the words back.

"I do," I whispered. I could barely stand to look at him now. There was nothing left in me for him; he was not at all who I'd thought and now all I wanted in the world was to be away from him.

Harry's face looked like it was collapsing in on itself. "Why?" burst out of his mouth, raw and savage.

And so I told him, "I don't love you."

"I don't believe you." His eyes were filling with tears.

I could have laughed at that. "It's the truth."

"No," he said, his voice suddenly regaining some of its usual strength. "No, Draco, you don't know what you're saying."

His arrogant certainty fuelled my anger with him for his fucking feelings, for his failures, for his spectacular inability to understand anything about me. "Yes, I do, Harry. When we leave here today it's over. It is over," I repeated, looking him straight in the face.

His face contorted again. "Have you met someone?"

"No," I said.

"You're lying."

"I'm not." I wasn't. I didn't need someone else to show me that I couldn't stay with Harry, I'd worked that out all by myself.

"Draco," he said again, reaching out to me, pleading. I flinched away. "Draco, please, we can't just break it off. You can't just leave me, everyone..."

"Everyone leaves you, right Harry?" I spat. "Everyone leaves poor little you all alone. Well I have had enough of you and your pathetic self-pity! Your whining, ball-less fucking self pity leaves me cold. I wanted you for your passion, but that wasn't real at all, was it? All you are is this gaping black hole and you wonder why you're alone? I can't bear you touching me anymore, and nothing you do is going to change the fact that I don't love you now and I never did!"

I don't know why I couldn't have been kinder to him. I don't know why I had to not just break his heart but to stamp on it. Maybe I was thinking it would make him change. Maybe it was the pain from the rough way he had taken me. Maybe I was just furious because he was so certain that he was entitled to have me that my feelings didn’t matter at all. But I accept that I provoked him into what came next.

All through my little speech, Harry's face had grown angrier and angrier until finally, as I spat the last word out at him, he gave an inarticulate yell of rage and leapt at me. His hands closed on my throat and he pinned me down to the bed, choking me. My hands came up instinctively to pull at his, but he just pressed harder. His face was right above mine, his tears dripping onto my face. All I could see was the pain I had inflicted on him. All I could think was, _I am going to die._

Somehow I got my leg up and with an almighty shove managed to send him off me. He was knocked onto the floor but I didn't dare hope he would cool down so quickly. My hand on the bedside cabinet scrambled for my wand and as he came at me again I threw a spell at him, something my godfather had taught me once. To this day I don't know why I chose that particular spell.

" _Sectumsempra_!" I cried, slashing the wand through the air wildly.

Blood flew through the room. Harry clutched at his chest, face white, then collapsed onto the floor, choked, wet sounds emerging from his throat. I sat on the bed paralysed, but when his hand reached out for me I simply ran, ran from the room, from the house, ran out into the garden staring at the wand in my hand as though it had no business at all being there. And then I realised that I had picked up his wand, too.

I had left him there. I cut him open and I left him there to bleed to death, no way to heal himself or send for help.

The enormity of what I had done didn't hit me until much later. There's a skip in my memory, as I go from standing in that damned garden to sobbing wild-eyed on the beautiful golden-sanded beach, the wind cold, the icy water of the Minch forbidding.

I didn't love him but I hadn't wanted to hurt him. I hadn't wanted to hurt him or anyone for years. I had made it through the war in safety and I'd never had to kill and now I was a murderer. I don't think you can understand how I felt then.

I didn't know what to do, where to go. The Manor might have been where I lived, but it wasn't where I thought of when I wanted somewhere safe – I thought instead of Durmstrang, which is how I found myself there. How I did not splinch myself I will never know.

Shivering, I walked into the castle to be told that Ninotchka had gone on sabbatical and a former student with the cumbersome name of Mikhail Ivanovich Poliakoff had taken over.

Misha, as we called him, had been a friend of Viktor's. He was Russian, he was someone I knew slightly who had always wanted to fuck me, and he would never dream of asking too many questions. It was the summer holidays, so with no students around and most of the teachers away, Misha welcomed me as though we were much closer than we'd ever been in my recollection. When I blathered something about having left some bits and pieces the year before and how it had been spur of the moment, and why, no, everything was fine, he didn’t question it. He just invited me to drink with him that night.

We made some idle chit chat – or rather he did. I sat there there, shaking. He asked me about life in Britain and I told him through numb lips about the whirlwind it had been before I met Harry. He laughed about how I'd always had all the luck, and then he pulled out a potion I knew to be illegal throughout Europe because of its questionable ingredients and its hallucinogenic properties.

I don't know how long I was there in that drugged-up haze, drinking those stupid illegal potions and talking to Misha, and feeling the overwhelming truth of what I had done tear at me. Harry, for whom I had not spared a thought during months and months of our "relationship," was now burned onto the back of my eyelids. The way the blood flew across the room. The way the spray hit the walls. The way he didn't even have time to send me a look filled with furious, surprised betrayal before he collapsed to the ground, clawing at his chest with fingers finding nothing but more blood.

I made a screeching noise in my throat at that last thought. " _Zaichick moya_?" enquired Misha, concerned, and I gasped desperately and reached past him for the bottle of red liquid, soft in the muted candlelight.

I would have done anything to smother the guilt, the shame. I had no idea I could feel so low, so vile. I never really thought of myself as having conscience before then. I saw staying out of the war as a tribute to my parents, I saw refusing to use Unforgivables as sensible considering one could be sent to Azkaban or executed depending on where one broke that particular law. For the first time I understood that I had been nothing but a coward, without even the moral conscience to risk returning home for my parents' funerals. I had always done exactly as I pleased and now someone was dead.

"Misha," I sobbed as he fucked me, "I've killed someone. Misha, I've killed someone." I cried and he hushed me, soothing me even as his thick cock split me in two. I wasn't even slightly aroused but the pain was soothing and when he held me after he came, held me as I sobbed, I felt the guilt ebb away until I felt nothing. Nothing at all.

 

~o0o~

 

I know what you're thinking. That was six months ago, so what does it have to do with what happened last night? While I appreciate that patience is not your forte, please try: we're in the home stretch now, and you _did_ ask for the whole story.

I stayed at Durmstrang for a few blurred-together days, pouring out my drugged-up heart to Misha because there was no one in the world I could have talked to who would have understood. My dearest friends would have sold me out over something like this – it could have dragged down the entire pureblood class if it had been allowed to get out. So I tried not to think, tried not to weep, ignored the concerned reports on the Wizarding Wireless World Service about Harry Potter's continuing disappearance and took more and more of the potion.

I was still bombed out of my mind when they came to arrest Misha for possession of illegal potions. I saw him getting arrested and was just cognisant enough to make my escape. No, of course you can't Apparate on Durmstrang's grounds. All schools have their secrets – I'm just lucky, I suppose, that the Doré they sent hadn't studied there. That's an alliance of European Auror Offices, by the way. Turns out Misha had been dealing to his students. Stupid, stupid man.

In any case, I landed in Knockturn Alley on my hands and knees, facedown with my fine robes filthy from five days spent fucking in them, out of them, on top of them. I made it to the Bear and Staff, that fine drinking establishment, and in the men's room mirror found myself shocked by my appearance: fucked out and haunted and covered with dirt from Durmstrang's secret passages. There were traces of semen and blood all over me.

I walked into the apothecary and used the last of my gold to buy a potion designed to clear all the others from my system. Merely by buying it I announced to the world the name and dose of the potion I had been abusing, but I could not in that moment bring myself to care.

When I sobered up I didn't know what to do. I wanted to pretend that everything was normal. Despite the sick, gnawing knowledge in my gut I wanted to pretend that nothing had changed. Despite the filth, I wanted to walk out on to Diagon Alley and let someone slip her arm beneath mine – not Pansy, she'd see immediately that something was very wrong, but the delicious Astoria perhaps, or that brunette from Samhain, what had her name been again? I wanted a pretty girl to take my arm and not notice the terrible darkness that had replaced what I now understood had been only a vacuous, viciously shallow understanding of life. I wanted to make it unhappen, and if I could make someone else believe it, then it would be true. That, after all, is how I made myself attractive out of nothing.

I straightened my shoulders and took a few steadying breaths, cast the cleaning charm that I could not have managed mere moments before, and walked out onto Diagon Alley.

Looking back, I must have been insane. If they'd found his body, if they'd figured it out… I could have been arrested immediately and it would have been a one-way ticket to Azkaban. No matter how isolated or fucked up Potter had felt, he was still the Boy-Who-Lived, the symbol of the great victory in the war. But I needed to prove to myself that nothing had changed. I thought that if I could pretend that something was normal then everything else would snap back into place.

So out I went onto the street, a little unsteady on the uneven cobblestones. I forced the politician's smile onto my face, pushed my shoulders back and blundered on.

I came out opposite Gringott's, which still looked regal and tall and forbidding. I breathed deeply, encouraged. Flourish & Blotts still had a window display full of rotating pictures of famous authors or subjects for biography. I knew that, but the sight of Harry in his Auror robes still caused me to gasp, until it became clear that it was only a picture.

Only a picture, I laughed at myself, and turned.

To look straight into Potter's face.

I started. I'm astonished that I didn't outright scream like a Victorian maiden confronted with her husband's cock for the first time. But Potter was there, and then he wasn't.

I tried to get myself under control, but suddenly Harry was looking at me from every street corner, every shop window. People were staring and whispering, pointing and gesturing. I walked further along, to Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, and there in the doorway were the Weasley girl, talking to the psychopath twins – and when they saw me, the expressions on all three faces turned ugly.

One of them even made a move towards me. I jerked my gaze away, and suddenly without meaning to I was running just as I had run from the croft house, running down Diagon Alley and spinning to Apparate out just as the three Weasleys barrelled around the corner, the cry of " _Malfoy!_ " ringing through the air.

Maybe it was the detox effects of the potion. Maybe Potter had somehow managed to curse me. Maybe he'd chosen to become a ghost just to haunt and stalk me some more. None of that would have surprised me. But the fact that I couldn't stop shaking, that I felt like I might sob at any moment – that surprised me, to say the least.

I had managed to get myself home to Malfoy Manor. I took two steps past the front door and I collapsed, shaking.

A day later, unable even to trust the wards anymore, I put myself under Fidelius. And then I just sort of… stopped.

Time passed. The house-elves must have been able to get out of the grounds because the food supplies never dwindled. I spent my days in silence.

I read, I ate, I functioned. I didn't drink or take any more potions because I couldn't bear the thought of Harry coming back to me again. I found it impossible to take joy in anything at all. I cut myself off from the world even as I prayed some days that the Aurors or the inevitable assassins would manage the impossible, break the Fidelius charm and put me out of my misery.

I slept in my parents' room, as it was the only place I had never allowed Harry to fuck me. I thought that would mean it was free from ghosts – but instead I saw the ghosts of my parents. I saw my mother, so elegant and strong, encouraging Father to send me to Durmstrang. She always used to write, not at a desk like the one Father had in his study, but there at her dressing table. I used to watch her when I was young, and I could see her doing it now, writing the letters that had assured me that everything was going to be all right until it was the last letter she would ever write me, in which she had told me it was too late and ordered me sternly to stay where I was until it was safe.

Father was killed by the Dark Lord, and it was his fault Mother died, but I never tried to avenge them. I let myself retain some innocence – don’t _laugh_ , do you think the war did anyone any favours? I saw you flinching when I told you what Potter had become – do you think I was lying about that? He lost everyone that meant something to him, he killed and tortured people - _Cruciatus_ is still torture, no? He ended up a shell, just the remnants of someone who could have been utterly breathtaking, and he never even got to make the choice.

I'm trying to tell you that for the first time, I realised that I _had_ had a choice, but what I had chosen was not to acknowledge that. I remember being furious when my parents died, furious when I received my mother's last letter and realised that she had known in advance that she was going to die but had chosen to save me instead of herself. I would have killed everyone who'd ever had a hand in her death. But she wrote, _Live for me, Draco. Don't avenge me, don't regret me or your Father. Know that we loved you, and live for us._

I cried the first time I read that letter. I remember I sobbed as though the tears were being wrenched out of me and then I gave away my virginity to a boy who grunted all the way through it and didn't notice I was crying. But I never felt my mother's words like scars until I was lying on my parents' bed, knowing I would most likely never leave the Manor again, and that because of what I had done, my parents had died for _nothing_.

I was twenty-two years old by then, and all I wanted was my mother.

And that day, I cancelled the Fidelius charm and took down the wards on the Manor grounds. I know you were wondering how that happened, and that's how – I did it. Not all of them, of course. I didn't want Muggles or common thieves to find me. I just wanted the crème de la crème of the wizarding world to have a fighting chance. I wanted someone to come and arrest or kill me, so I dismantled the wards and waited for them. For you, I could even say – I was waiting for you.

December, always a time of joy before, crept up unannounced. Newspapers and the wireless were strictly forbidden, and so it wasn't until one of the house-elves started muttering about how disgraceful it was that they hadn't been ordered to decorate the manor that I realised how much time had passed.

I ordered them instead to stock up on Firewhisky. Despite the risk of bringing the shadows of Harry past to life within my mind, I felt that the only thing worse than going through Christmas drunk would be to go through it sober. My parents were dead, my lover… and yes, I could acknowledge that Harry had been that, perhaps the only lover I'd ever had, was dead at my hands, and the only other home I had ever known was where I had almost been arrested.

"Cheers," I said to the chill December air on Christmas Eve, unable even to sit still within the manor walls, raising a bottle of whisky in salute and taking a deep, healthy swig.

It was a clear night, the kind Astronomy professors kill for.

At first I wasn't surprised to see Harry walking towards me, dressed all in his sexy Auror robes, his hair every bit as dishevelled as when I had seen him that day in the lift. I raised the bottle to him sardonically, and took another long swallow. But Harry was still there when I looked again. And he was still there when I looked again. And he was getting closer.

Suddenly it occurred to me that here was vengeance come at last – Harry had come back to kill me. But while at times in the depth of my misery that had, self-indulgently, seemed as though it would be a desirable outcome, when I saw him striding closer and closer I ran.

I was in the folly at the bottom of the garden and he was walking down from the manor; I panicked and ran into the woods, dropping the bottle back on the floor. It was like the flight from the Dark Lord eating the unicorn so many years before – Potter and I in the woods, my cowardice pulsing through my veins more potent than any adrenaline.

The icy chill in the air made my breathing come hard. The alcohol in my system seemed abruptly to have lost its effect – I was stone cold sober and running for my life, running from the shout of "Malfoy!" coming from behind me.

I had never been scared before in a way I would not have responded to with magic – but after what I had done to him before I didn't dare raise my wand against him now. So when he abruptly Apparated himself in front of me, just in time for me to run smack into him and fall to the ground, I felt like a Muggle witnessing magic for the first time.

"Merry Christmas," Harry said, exactly the way he had right after he'd fucked me for the first time, though his eyes were a lot colder. I nearly fainted. I was terrified – yes, all right, but we've already established that I'm a coward and just by the way, if someone you were certain you had killed was suddenly standing in front of you, I'd love to know how cool and collected _you'd_ be. May I continue?

I gibbered something nonsensical and stared up at him, petrified. And then, bizarrely, his face seemed to soften a little. He reached out a hand to help me up and then he said, "I came to get my wand back, Malfoy."

By the time he was following me back to the house, I knew that he was real. Not a ghost, not someone using Polyjuice. Oh, others could wear the glasses, fake the scar, but the burning expression in the eyes, the scent and the force and the heat radiating from his body – it was him. No question at all of that.

I had no idea how to feel. Confused, afraid, relieved? Joy and tension warred within me. I didn't speak as I led him through the manor, and he seemed quite content merely to follow.

And now, even more so with him here, everywhere I looked the ghosts of our past fucks seemed to linger. When we reached the study, the most logical place to keep the wand given that the room was already _verboten_ due to the other memories it could elicit, I darted a glance at Harry, wondering if he too remembered the way he'd made me howl and grunt on the surface of my father's desk. I wondered if he was thinking of the way he fucked me from behind as I tried to keep my arms propped up on the opposite edge of the table or the vicious way he'd slapped my arse when my arms had gone from under me.

None of it showed on his face. Neither the memory of that early, frantic fuck, nor the memory of the last time, when he'd hurt me and I'd cut him open for his trouble.

I slid the box with his wand in it across the desk.

"I didn't know what to do with it," I said as he opened it up. "I haven't exactly been out in a long time."

Harry held the wand in his hand, reacquainting himself with the feel of it. "Holly. Eleven inches. Phoenix feather core," he said to himself. He smiled a little brighter, then, and met my gaze. "I'm wandering around with the Elder Wand, you know – it's likely to get me into all sorts of trouble."

I didn't know what to say to that. Harry was walking around with the power of legends at his fingertips and I was afraid to leave the Manor grounds.

"Would you like some tea?" I managed hoarsely.

In the drawing room, where the seats were more comfortable, Harry sipped his tea. I watched him, hungry for the details of him as I had never been before. The play of firelight on his golden skin, the way his robe folded. His hair had grown longer and was even more unkempt. I wanted to run my fingers through it and curl my hand around his neck to reassure myself of the reality of him. But I knew, of course, that he would never let me touch him again.

Harry looked different. Not just the subtle differences in his appearance, but the way he carried himself. I could see that he had been completely broken, but this time he had rebuilt himself to last. He still had a deep sadness running through him, but now he was more resigned than desperate. He was much more in control of himself than I had ever thought he could become – there was no way he could have been sitting there sipping tea with me if he hadn't been. And I just sat there, looking at him as though I'd never look enough.

"I was seeing you everywhere," I said finally. "Thought you'd cursed me somehow."

"Just your conscience, Malfoy," he said, a reluctant sort of smile tugging at his lips. "Who'd ever have thought?"

"I was so sure I'd killed you," I whispered, and pressed the back of my hand to my mouth. I was certain I was going to cry, I was so utterly overwhelmed. Harry had walked in and swept me away and barely blinked. All that was left was some strange, trembling puppy version of the person I had thought I was.

He put down the tea. "Nearly. I couldn't Apparate, I couldn't stick myself back together. I took a Blood-Replenishing Potion – you think Aurors don't carry emergency potions?" he said at the expression on my face and I gave a half-laugh. This conversation was making me feel light-headed, as though the sight of Harry Potter in my kitchen again wasn't hard enough to take. "Blood-Replenishing Potion and a Portkey to a safe house. Both were concealed in my boot."

I could have laughed, though the sound would probably have come out choked and broken. I had barely managed to inconvenience Harry, and I had been torturing myself for months. As if I could seriously have killed the man for whom Auror training had been deemed a waste of time!

Harry's eyes found mine again, a compass unerringly finding north. "I was there for a fortnight, recuperating. After that, I didn't know what to do. I thought you were hiding from me because you were afraid. I would have come before, but…" His eyes flashed, his voice turning slightly harder. "I don't know what I might have done."

I ran my hand through my hair, suddenly wishing that I had been taking better care of myself. What a time for vanity to return. But if you can think of an appropriate response to the evening I had been having, please do tell.

"You might want to think carefully before you get involved next time," Harry said, his voice stern yet somehow gentle. It made something in my gut twist.

"You survived," I said, my eyes raking desperately over his face though I couldn't have said why.

A trace of a smile on his lips. "I'm the Boy-Who-Lived, remember? Who else would ever be that lucky?"

I had to look away from him. It was all too raw.

"I should go," he said, standing up from his chair; I rose, too, my body instinctively following the motions of his. "I take it I can't…"

"It would take a stronger wizard than me to take down the wards on the Manor itself," I told him. "You can Apparate from the grounds."

I trailed after him through the Manor and to the front door. I could feel tension building up in my body. I had no right to ask for anything, but I needed some acknowledgement from him of the terrible debt that lay between up. At the door he turned to me again, and said, "I suppose this is goodbye."

And then out of nowhere I heard myself blurt out, "Or you could stay."

Harry met my gaze, incredulous.

"I mean," I back-pedalled for all I was worth, "there are all these rooms, and it's raining."

Considering that Harry would be out in the rain for ninety seconds at most, it was a terrible excuse.

"Better not," he said, still looking at me as though wondering if I were mad. But whatever he saw on my face made his expression soften into something rueful, tender. "Better not," he said again, and then without warning he dragged me into his arms and held me.

And oh, the joy that leapt through me then. He held me and I knew I'd been forgiven, and the terrible cracked thing inside me healed. It's wonderful to feel forgiven. It's heady as wine.

Harry pulled away. I don't know if what I was feeling really was desire for him, or just the overwhelming joy of knowing that the prison I had constructed for myself wasn't necessary. I wanted to ask him if we could see each other again – not like you're thinking, I just wanted to see him. I was different and he was different and maybe _we_ could be different now that, for the first time, it seemed we understood each other.

But at the same time, there was too much between us – pain and heartbreak and guilt and desire and fear and loathing and jealousy and so, so much.

His mouth was red and I raised my hand to stroke it with my thumb.

Harry caught my hand and pulled it away from his face. His gaze never left mine. "You're still fucking gorgeous," he said softly, green eyes pressing their message into mine.

And then he was gone.

I watched him walk away from the grand entrance to the Manor, down the steps and along the path into the gardens, all of it slick with the rain. I watched him until he disappeared in the darkness, and then I closed the door over and I let the relief wash over me again, turning me blissful and boneless.

Do you see why, after that, I couldn't possibly have killed him? I know about remorse now, don't you understand? Even if I hated him – which I don't, haven't for the longest time – I know what it costs now, to kill. I know the terrible price you pay for an act of violence, and I know how guilt eats you alive.

Harry left, and as I leaned against the foyer wall I remember thinking in that moment, _I will never see Harry again. How very strange._ I would have expected to feel nothing. I _had_ felt nothing for months, until I saw him. I had found a way to live with knowing I was alone, and a murderer, and then Harry had come back from the dead to forgive me. Can you imagine how that felt?

I said before that it wasn't about revenge, and it wasn't, for me. I wasn't fucking him for revenge and I never wanted to hurt him for revenge. And I don't think it really was about revenge for Potter, either, in the end. He could have had me arrested, he could even have killed me. I would have been in no position to resent any punishment he chose to inflict upon me; he could have done anything he wanted to me and I would have let him. But he didn't. Instead…

It's rather spectacularly ironic, isn't it? The man I murdered six months ago is the man who died yesterday.

I'm amazed you're even listening to me talk, frankly. You must know it wasn't me who killed him or you'd already have me in a room full of Dementors. I'm barely afraid of that anymore, you know. Not after the things I've lived with knowing about myself.

I heard that Misha broke out of Nurmengard. I wonder if he came looking for me, thinking I was the one who'd reported him for the potions. As if I could. Did he curse first and ask later? I can only imagine his face when he saw who he'd killed instead.

Or was it a cadre of Weasleys, perhaps, come for their revenge at last, using me as their scapegoat because who would ever believe I hadn't killed him? Maybe it was one of those last Death Eaters you, dear Aurors, have never managed to catch. Or maybe he was killed for the Elder Wand the way he'd been warned he might be. I don't know. I don't know and I never will unless you see fit to tell me – and even then I won't know if you were right. I won't ever know for certain who killed him or why. All I'll ever know is that he's dead.

I should feel relieved. I should still be feeling the euphoria I felt when I realised I hadn't killed him, but I don't. I will never see Harry again, and I don't think it's strange and I don't think it's just and I don't think it's anything except bitterly, viciously ironic because…

He wanted me and he died; I wanted him and he died. I killed him because I wanted to leave; someone else killed him because he chose not to stay. I will never see Harry again, and it's tearing me apart, and you love seeing it, don't you, you sadistic fucks. And if it were anyone else I'd probably agree. It _is_ funny, hilarious really, because I think that when he held me that last time and I knew he had forgiven me…

I think I finally fell in love with him after all.

~fin


End file.
